Mantrapped (20 page)

'Have you told the police?' asked Doralee. What did he mean, there was nothing going on? Why did he even feel the need to say it? 'Isn't that the first thing to do?'

'Try telling a call centre this kind of thing,' said the Trisha body from the sofa. 'They'll only ask you for your mother's maiden name and send round the social workers.'

'And what is my mother's maiden name?' asked Doralee.

'It's O'Neill, of course,' the Trisha body said. 'One of the Liverpool O'Neills.'

Doralee was finally convinced.

Back to the past

Louis Simpson's advice had borne fruit. He had explained to me how a novel was written. The first two I wrote were written out of ignorance, merely the novels I wanted to read which no one else had yet written, so I'd better get on with it. Others have since caught up with me of course: the unreflective present tense abounds in contemporary fiction: it is appropriate for drama -
she walks across the stage - he lights a cigarette -
but doesn't add much to fiction other than to give a spurious sense of immediacy, limiting the right to overview, to the god-like status of the author, to the moral intervention made possible by the past tense. The stage author, other than by choosing and shaping the subject and writing the dialogue, has no intervening power. It is left to action and event to convey such wisdom as the head of the writer contains. Those early present tense novels of mine were written in the present not because I had thought about it, but because I had started writing in play form and then, novelising what I had written, simply neglected to change the tenses. It worked well enough. So well that in the meanwhile the Gods of the past tense have all but fled. Even history documentaries on TV prefer the immediacies of the present tense to any serious consideration of the past. '
Henry VIII strides through the palace in a temper. His wife is betraying him. "Cut off her head," he yells.''

Now I started to write
Female Friends
. By this time I was being described by my publishers as a 'feminist' writer. Or as in a TV documentary, 'By
this time her publishers describe her as a feminist writer
.' The description comes from them, not her, but she suspects it is in the eye of the beholder. She writes about women in relationship to one another, not to men. This is a shocking divergence from tradition. What she says is disconcerting to others. Friends leave rooms when she comes into them. She is by implication suggesting a revolution: that women need not be men's victims, that men are not automatically objects of adoration, that women are people too. Nobody wants to hear this at the time. To women it suggests that whole lives spent as daughters, sister, wives, mothers, to the abnegation of the self, have been wasted. It denies the past. To men it suggests a terrifying future in which women no longer automatically wash shirts because they are women.

But Fay cannot help what she writes: she describes the world around her; this is not propaganda, simply what she sees. She is bemused by the hostility she meets. She is not trying to change, just to describe. Twenty-five years later, addressing a festival in Chicago, she tries to recant in public, but every time she quotes passages from her early novels which could be fairly said at the time but no longer can, the audience cheer and laugh. '
Men
,' she quotes herself from the platform, '
are like little boys behaving badly at a birthday party. They get away with what they can
.' Such casual generalisations, she murmurs to her audience, are unfair, prejudicial and old-fashioned. She wastes her breath. The triumphant army of women exult too much in victory to understand remorse. Everything turns into an anti-man fest. The way to make an audience laugh is to utter anti-male sentiments, and the men laugh louder and more nervously than anyone.

Fay has a little glass pyramid of a paperweight she keeps on her desk to remind her of the occasion. Engraved in the glass are the words Chicago Humanities Festival III,
From Freedom to Equality
. She loves it dearly, but thinks it would make just as much sense if it read
From Equality to Freedom
. Did women need to be free before they were equal, or equal before they could be free? Abstract nouns get flung about these days any old how. Women are neither free nor equal, of course, but we can be fairly sure these days that it is not men's fault, at least not men in general, though no doubt blame can be attributed to individual men. We will see how Trisha gets on in Peter's body. Who then will she blame for what goes wrong?

The glass pyramid is chipped - perhaps someone flung it across the room once in a temper, but Fay cannot remember, fortunately, who it was who did the flinging, just as Trisha can't remember who it was who spilt the wine upon her mattress.

The third-person present works well enough, I see. Should I continue further with the real-life story of my life in a further book, it could continue in the same vein. '
She does this, they do that: moving swiftly across the room she faces her opponents'
etc. It could be mistaken for a novel. Its predecessor,
Auto da Fay
, was conventional enough, other than - when I could no longer bear to incorporate the reality of certain sections of my past, I slipped over into the third person for a time. This book,
Mantrapped
, is the second volume, and presents novel and autobiography side by side, leaping from one to the other, but related.

Doralee, Trisha and Peter

'I'm truly sorry, Dor alee - pretty name, that,' said the Peter body. 'You must have had a really nice mother. Nice mothers give their children nice names. I hope you don't mind me settling in here for a day or two. I'm not one to stay where I'm not wanted. But your husband here, sorry, partner, doesn't think it's wise for us to be separated. And he's right, we don't want to be too far away from one another in case whatever it was that switched on the stairs wanted
to
hop right back and distance might make a difference. How would one know?'

The voice washed over Doralee. It was strange to hear Peter's voice in this mode, non-stop, hesitant, confiding, nervous and endearing all at once. Had the voice been female she could have ignored it altogether, since it seemed to have so little sensible to say, but being male, and Peter's at that, it kept catching her attention. She was on the Internet, trying to find out some kind of information, any kind of information, about body swaps, and not getting very far. She couldn't concentrate. The Trisha body lay sprawled out on the sofa, taking a nap. The Peter voice burbled on.

'There must be someone we can ask out there. I'm sure you guys know the right kind of people. I tend to know theatricals and racing drivers and in any case I've been rather out of touch lately. If this goes on for any length of time I might consider becoming a male model. I have the contacts. Has your partner ever thought of doing that?' 'It's not quite Peter's scene,' said Doralee. 'I'm not going back to Mrs Kovac's no matter what,' said the Peter body. 'That woman is a toe-rag and a bitch. She was taking advantage. But how am I meant to claim housing benefit if I turn up as a man when I've said on the forms I'm a woman? They're really funny about things like sex change.'

'I'm sure Peter and I can help you out,' said Doralee. 'That's a comfort to know,' said the Peter body. It was studying its nails. 'Look,' it said. 'All perfect. Your partner has very strong nails. That's nice. Mine do tend to go brittle and flake. Well, that's his problem, now. None of this is my fault.'

'I'm sure this won't go on for long,' said Doralee. 'We'll work on it, get it sorted.' She did not know what else to say. She was in uncharted territory. Who could she talk to? She did not trust Peter to be wholly Peter. To confide in Heather would be rash. She couldn't trust her any more than she could Heaven. She was still chafing from her conversations with her family. The Internet, instead of a fountain of wisdom and information, seemed a broken reed.

Dawn was breaking over the city skyline: indeed, an early shaft of sun shone onto her computer screen and made it difficult to read. She had found life swap and spouse swap and surgical sexchange and transsexual and intersexual chat rooms, and TV programmes a-plenty, hermaphrodite counselling, and cross-dressing and troilism and meet your partner here, and porn sites kept breaking through, but nothing relevant that Doralee could find, other than in the witches' Sabbath, where the devil sometimes changed into a woman. And of course Zeus could change into all kinds of things -bulls, swans - but always kept his own gender, even when old. And women in mythology could change into trees or spiders but never anything male. There were cases in psychiatric literature of males who believed they were female, or females male, but they were deluded. She switched off the computer. It took its time fading.

The body Peter sat primly on a stool and chattered on, male knees genteelly together. And the body Trisha sprawled on the sofa, dozing, legs akimbo, knickers actually showing, and then stirred and woke, and Doralee frowned at her, and the Peter body took time to realise what was wrong before moving her legs together. Gender mannerisms took time to kick in, it seemed. But over the next hour, while the Peter body flicked through the glossies, and the Trisha body took a bath, and Doralee waited for offices to open and the fresh day to begin, new habits were quickly learned, so soon the body Trisha was taking little mincing steps and the body Peter beginning to stride about. Doralee worried that the same might happen to their mental habits and personality traits - they would begin to meld into one. She opened a file on her computer, ready to record case notes from time to time. She would turn this into a book, before she was through.

The walls lacked substance. She felt that if she stretched out her hand it might simply pass through them. Yet the Trisha and the Peter bodies seemed more and more substantial, as if they were the real people and she was not. Every imperfection was cruelly magnified. The hairs in the Peter nostrils were long and black and thick, the sides of Trisha's foot beneath the ankles were a mass of blue veins. They were like cartoon figures, in which the artist had drawn in salient points, rather than attempting a realistic model. She felt very little emotional connection with either. 'Peter,' she said to the Trisha body, 'I didn't go to a hypnotist or anything for the magazine? I might be just seeing and hearing everything wrong, and then the memory of the session wiped. If I had been told you were Trisha and Trisha was you this would be what it was like.' 'No such luck,' said the Trisha body in her absurd little pipey, flutey voice. 'There's going to be no clap hands and everyone wake up.'

Doralee took a polaroid of the three of them, but there was nothing unusual to be seen: one man and two women. She did not know what she had been hoping for. She opened a box file and marked it 'Swapped' and put the photograph in it.

She made coffee and ran out for some croissants - both the bodies seemed reluctant to leave the flat, and felt better, almost normal, when she got back. She had coped with problems before. She would again. She had always been good at going into emergency gear when faced with a crisis. Once she'd even dived into the school swimming pool to rescue a drowning pupil - and been made head girl as a result.

The Peter body said he never ate Nutrispread, could he have butter instead, and Doralee explained they never ate butter, it was fattening and clogged up the arteries, and then the Trisha body said she'd really appreciate some butter too, for once. Fuck the arteries. Doralee could see she'd have to be careful they didn't gang up against her - the two freaks against the normal one. Not that they were really freaks: she must not lose her sympathy for them. The Trisha body housed her own dear Peter, the Peter body a woman with whom she had little in common but had done her no harm. But it was difficult.

The Peter body took out a cigarette and thought about lighting it.

'Don't even think about it,' Doralee said. 'This is a no-smoking zone.' It might be that the body Peter was succumbing to stress and taking his first cigarette after three years, or it might be that the soul Trisha was a habitual smoker she was the kind who would be - either way it could not be allowed to happen in her house. The cigarette was stubbed out okay, but Doralee noticed that both the bodies sighed. There really was not much time, if she wanted the unalloyed originals back. It was hard to envisage life without Peter. She was so accustomed to him. He could scarcely be improved upon. He did not annoy her in any way. He was useful to her in her career. He was good to be seen about with. Waitresses tried to chat him up. Other girls looked after him in the street. He made her laugh - not often, but sometimes. They agreed upon nearly everything. The sex was really good. At their 'engagement' party she had found Heather crying in the bathroom: Heather had wanted Peter for herself. She had got over it since, of course, and married and was now pregnant, but it was nice to know he was seriously in demand. But if he to was to go, she would survive.

She planned to make emergency appointments with a psychiatrist whom she had met at a charity dinner for Aids Awareness and a professor of anthropology she had met at the Alternative Medicine Awards. The Trisha body emphasised that she did not want any of this getting out. Peter was a news-breaker, not a news-maker. It would do Doralee's career no good to be associated with scandal, the Trisha body reminded her. Their employers would not appreciate it if they themselves made headlines.
(Your scandal
, Doralee found herself thinking,
not mine. I am innocent in all this. I am not even married to you
. And then she chided herself for her disloyalty.)

The Peter body rashly murmured that personally she was all for selling the story to the highest bidder, and then relying on the experts - the
Mail
was bound to have them - to bring her and Peter back to normal and then everyone could go back to sleep. 'No such thing as bad publicity,' said the Peter body. 'Not in my book.'